In many e-business systems, businesses would like to maintain tight control over which people have access to sensitive information, such as sales, product, or customer information in a legacy database. In conventional systems this is not an issue, as anyone given access to a system has access to all resources and data on that system. In an enterprise system, any applications can be placed behind a firewall. Certain people are given access to the system through the firewall, but again have access to all resources once inside the firewall. This requires a system administrator to keep a close watch on who is accessing these resources.
Existing e-business solutions for managing business workflow, as well as for enabling standardized business-to-business (B2B) messaging, utilize separate system user identities for each of these applications. A user identity for a business process management (BPM) component provides a user with access to all BPM resources, such as JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). A user identity for B2B provides a B2B user with access to B2B resources, such as messaging resources with possible exceptions such as servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs). Administrators for systems using both of these applications have to manage these separate identities. This does not provide for ease of use.
Systems using such applications can have problems with unauthorized users accessing the system using one of these user identities. For example, an unauthorized user could access system data through a system node if that unauthorized user obtained a proper username and password. The unauthorized user could simply generate a request that appears to the system to be an authenticated request.
Some systems have addressed such security concerns by “locking down” the system. For instance, certain systems include an additional access code or flag that provides the system with the ability to allow or disallow Java naming and directory interface (JNDI) lookups. This is a potential problem point, however, as systems may operate in a cluster with more than one node. One of these nodes may want to do a JNDI lookup on another node, which will not be possible if JNDI lookups are locked down. It also will be impossible to use other features of the system. Many system components and resources are interrelated, and lockdown will cause problems for many of these components.